How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff Read Free Book Online

was flour. Not that they paid any attention to our list anyway. We got what we got.
    So OK, there was smallpox. But because everything was getting worse by little daily increments and you didn't know what was true or not true it seemed easier just to treat this news as another fact of life and nothing particularly to worry about.
    Think about it. It's May in the middle of the English Countryside. And everyone's saying It's the most beautiful May we've had in years and Isn't it ironic? From my point of view this made any doomsday scenario even harder to get my head around, especially having grown up in the Concrete Jungle, which possibly overstates the case given that the Upper West Side is fairly leafy, as concrete jungles go. But we're still talking about a few nice trees here and there whereas in England I was drowning in fertility. And although there were tons of rumors coming from every direction, nothing THAT BAD seemed to be happening to any of US.
    Meanwhile about 100,000 white roses all over the front of the house are blooming like mad, the vegetables grow about six inches a day, and the flower gardens all around the house are so full of color that you couldn't help feeling ecstatic and dizzy just looking at them. According to one of Isaac's rare speeches, the birds were happier with the invasion than they'd been in years since no one was driving cars or farming or doing anything much to disturb them, so all they did was lay eggs and sing and try to avoid getting eaten by foxes.
    It was getting to be like Walt Disney on Ecstasy outside the house what with squirrels and hedgehogs and deer wandering around with the ducks and dogs and chickens and goats and sheep and if anyone looked totally disoriented by this whole war thing it was them.
    Piper and Edmond and Isaac and I used to watch this lunatic fringe milling around every day around sunset and then Edmond and I would slip away up to the tiny bedroom at the top of the house or the big storage closet under the eaves or the lambing barn or one of about a thousand places we'd found where we could try and try and try to get enough of each other but it was like some witch's curse where the more we tried to stop being hungry the more starving we got.
    It was the first time in as long as I could remember that hunger wasn't a punishment or a crime or a weapon or a mode of self-destruction.
    It was simply a way of being in love.
    Sometimes I thought hours had passed when really it was minutes. Sometimes we fell asleep and then woke up to finish where we'd left off. Sometimes I felt like I was being consumed from within like a person with one of those freak diseases where you digest your own stomach. And sometimes we had to stop, just because we were raw and exhausted and still humming humming humming with something we didn't even have the strength left to do anything about.
    Then we would sleep for a little while and eventually reappear and try to act normal which meant things like helping Piper search for honeycomb or dandelion leaves or spending a few hours weeding the vegetable garden. All the sunshine meant there were vegetables earlier than there should have been, and given the dire straits we were supposedly in, there seemed to be lots of food. And of course being me, now that there was a war on and rationing and all, I was in deprivation heaven and hardly needed my father screwing Davina in the next room to help me lose my appetite for a few years.
    The rest of them ate eggs and goat's milk and greens from the garden, and there were baked beans that we'd stockpiled and Piper was getting incredibly good at making things with the dried beans and rice and bacon they put in our package most weeks. There were starting to be tomatoes from the garden, and there were lots of green beans and everyone except me missed bread which was getting harder to come by and especially Anchor butter which Edmond said he dreamed about though we made something I thought worked pretty well by